Inventor of the Week: James Jacob Ritty

James Jacob Ritty, inventor of the first working version of a mechanical cash register, was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1837. Ritty was a barkeeper who opened his first saloon in 1871. In 1882 he opened the Pony House in Dayton, which quickly became a local ‘hotspot’ for dining, drinking, and gaming… One of the biggest problems Ritty had at his bar was that some of his employees were dishonest, and would take the customers’ money and pocket it…”

About this project

This is the world's largest online collection of found grocery lists. In fact, we wrote the book on found grocery lists. Why? Other peoples' grocery lists are fascinating. Plus, the internet is a great place to do stupid interesting things. So far 3,500 funny, crazy, weird, sad and/or mundane discarded scraps of paper have been posted. But it's not all useless stuff -- we also link to useful and interesting articles about food, shopping, lists, collecting, and more, as well as provide a pretty awesome downloadable PDF grocery list for free.

Buy our book

Originally released as a hardcover in 2007, the book based on this site went out-of-print after our appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Happily, it's been re-released in paperback with a new cover and is available at a very reasonable cost (there's a Kindle version too). So please buy it!